RICHARD JAECKEL Biography - Actors and Actresses

 
 

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RICHARD JAECKEL

Name: Richard Hanley Jaeckel                                                         
Born:10 October 1926                                                                 
Died: 14 June 1997                                                                   
                                                                                     
Richard Hanley Jaeckel (October 10, 1926 - June 14, 1997) was an American actor.     
                                                                                     
Jaeckel was born in Long Beach, New York. A short, but tough guy, he played a         
variety of characters in his 50 years in movies and television and became one of     
Hollywood's best known character actors. Jaeckel got his start in the business       
at the age of 17 while working as a mailboy at 20th Century Fox studios in           
Hollywood. A casting director auditioned him for a key role in the 1943 film         
Guadalcanal Diary, Jaeckel won the role and settled into a lengthy career in         
supporting parts.                                                                     
                                                                                     
He served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1949, then starred in two of the most           
remembered war films of 1949, Battleground and Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne.     
He also played the role of Turk, the daughter's boyfriend, in the celebrated         
1952 film Come Back, Little Sheba, co-starring with Shirley Booth, Burt               
Lancaster, and Terry Moore. He played Lee Marvin's able second-in-command in The     
Dirty Dozen.                                                                         
                                                                                     
The highlight of Jaeckel's career was in 1971, when he received an Academy Award     
nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Sometimes a Great Notion.       
He had a recurring role in the short-lived Andy Griffith vehicle Salvage 1. In       
his later years, Jaeckel was known to TV audiences as Lt. Ben Edwards on the         
series Baywatch. He also appeared on TV Series Spenser: For Hire.                     
                                                                                     
Jaeckel died in 1997, aged 70, after a three year battle with melanoma, at the       
Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. His son,       
Barry, is a professional golfer who has won on the PGA Tour.